Procession Of Talking Mirrors, LP

Quick Overview

A2. Now The Fire Worries About The Amounts Of Wood It Needs To Put Out (6:57)

A3. Plague Pillow (7:09)

B1. Procession Of Talking Mirrors (9:03)

B2. He Will Drink The Milk Of A Thousand Mothers (3:20)

B3. The Lost Wooden Planet Script (6:43)

Release Date: 10 March 2013

Limited edition of 350 copies

The person behind Urpf Lanze is Belgian visual artist Wouter Vanhaelemeesch (B), who is mainly known for his large-scale ink drawings that offer a hermetic blend of weirdo characters, medieval iconography and surrealist decors. His artwork started gaining attention a few years ago when renowned avant-garde lutenist Jozef Van Wissem (NL) started using Vanhaelemeesch's work to decorate several sleeves of his recorded output, including his collaborations with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (US), noise legends Smegma (US), free folkband United Bible Studies (IE) and fingerpicker James Blackshaw (UK). Next to doing exhibitions in places like Tokyo, New York and Paris, his drawings appear regularly in zines and underground publications all over the world. He also runs the audioMER label together with designer Jeroen Wille (BE) and has provided artwork for records by Jack Rose (US), Robbie Basho (US), Mauro Antonio Pawlowski (BE), Cian Nugent (IE), Graveyards (US), Second Family Band (US) and many others.

Urpf Lanze is the moniker of his rather unorthodox solo guitar project, under which he has been playing for several years now. With an acoustic guitar that lays flat on his lap, tuned to unwieldy scales, he brutalises the instrument in an oddly musical way. As if this wasn't enough he lays down some vocal work that goes from ventriloquist-like whines and mumbles to deep and guttural grunts.

The result is a rather unhinged and demented music. Imagine the rawness of Bill Orcutt, the more frightening sides of Loren Mazzacane Connors and the absurd stylings of Wilburn Burchette all wrapped into a Lovecraftian sonic nightmare. 'Procession of Talking Mirrors' is his first full lenght solo album. Recorded live on a 4-track tape recorder, these 6 tracks offer a mixture of Japanese folk music, free psych, scratchy delta-blues recordings, damaged lo-fi and aggressively percussive fingerpicking. While some tracks may carry a more melancholy tone, others seem closer to acoustic death metal than any kind of folk music.

Like the young knight Perceval, who sits speechless and confused in the presence of the Procession of the Grail, Urpf Lanze (real name: Wouter Vanhaelemeesch) stands guitar-in-hand, frog-in-throat, before The Procession of Talking Mirrors. The mirrors reflect a gruesome scene of guitars being torn to shreds by tornado-like fingers; a rumbling superstorm of breath growls and screeches out the echoing chambers of the beast’s vast throat and mouth.

The The Procession of Talking Mirrors LP (which has beautifully appropriate cover artwork made by the musician) will be released by Belgian label audioMER on March 10. For now, the label has posted the riotous finale of the record, “The Lost Wooden Planet Script.”

This is Urpf Lanze aka Belgian visual artist Wouter Vanhaelemeesch's first solo acoustic guitar album. His music has been described as outsider or anti-folk, but here he rides roughshod over such considerations. Some of the pieces approach the ecstatic, naggingly insistent style displayed by James Blackshaw and the late Jack Rose on Raag Manifestos. But if Vanhaelemeesch lacks the refinement of those two players, he makes up for it with aggression. With his acoustic guitar flat on his lap, he subjects it to some rough vocalisations. On "Plague Pillow", where he obsessively works on a picking pattern around three chords, they seem almost absent-minded murmurs. Elsewhere, as on the title track, his grunts, throaty growls and baleful ululations can be distracting, almost comedic. But this track also exemplifies his singular approach to the guitar. Veering from insistent percussive batterings to bending slackened strings to finely articulated runs, he employs disciplined technique and the power of sloppiness in a way that few other guitarists would even consider trying.

While he is recognised as one of history’s great Romantic poets, it is less well known that in the later stages of his life Johann Wolfgang von Goethe turned his attention to the natural sciences, becoming a prominent figure in the group of pre-Darwinians now known as the Rational Morphologists. Under the assumption that the species they observed were frozen, unchanging in time, these thinkers searched for the underlying laws of form that governed their development. In a slim but influential volume, The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe argued that all features of plants, stamen, sepals, petals, etc., were essentially variants of a fundamental form, the leaf, raising this structure in his mind to the basic descriptor of all plant life, one which would open a window on the essence of this biological kingdom, the archetypal plant: the urpflanze.

On the face of it, what we have here is a solo guitar album. Wouter Vanhaelemeesch plays with the guitar flat on his lap, often dwelling on a single chord for a whole track, using repetition, tempo, and a style of fingerpicking that distributes and moves accent across notes in a downright psychedelic sort of way. It is percussive and metallic at its most aggressive, bewilderingly hypnotic during quieter moments. Add to this a growling, grunting, wailing vocal presence that never leans towards anything like lyricism or even the control of metal vocals, just an accompanying series of mammalian outbursts requiring neither rhyme nor reason. The result has the exhilarating feeling of a technically talented artist casting the rules down a deep and mosscovered well, at once musically potent and deliciously unhinged, far more grubby than its genre classification might suggest.

At around 40 minutes this is a relatively short album, but in no way does it seem like a job half done. Its vision is chaotic, weird, perhaps uninterpretable, but in the end it comes across with extreme clarity. Paying lip service to blues, folk, and American primitivism along the way, the theme that remains constant across the board is a counterpoise between the roughness of the voice with the violent rattling guitar, and the emergence of subtle melodic and rhythmic patterns among them, perpetually being swept away by altered copies of themselves. It’s a work that wears its vision and artistic allegiances on its sleeve, from the music itself to the subtext in the track titles to the cover art with its shades of Hieronymous Bosch. For anyone with an ear for acoustic guitar music which puts raw humanity ahead of clinical studio treatment, look no further than this.

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Details

tracklist:

A1. Father Earthquake (7:13)
A2. Now The Fire Worries About The Amounts Of Wood It Needs To Put Out (6:57)
A3. Plague Pillow (7:09)
B1. Procession Of Talking Mirrors (9:03)
B2. He Will Drink The Milk Of A Thousand Mothers (3:20)
B3. The Lost Wooden Planet Script (6:43)

Release Date: 10 March 2013Limited edition of 350 copies

The person behind Urpf Lanze is Belgian visual artist Wouter Vanhaelemeesch (B), who is mainly known for his large-scale ink drawings that offer a hermetic blend of weirdo characters, medieval iconography and surrealist decors. His artwork started gaining attention a few years ago when renowned avant-garde lutenist Jozef Van Wissem (NL) started using Vanhaelemeesch's work to decorate several sleeves of his recorded output, including his collaborations with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (US), noise legends Smegma (US), free folkband United Bible Studies (IE) and fingerpicker James Blackshaw (UK). Next to doing exhibitions in places like Tokyo, New York and Paris, his drawings appear regularly in zines and underground publications all over the world. He also runs the audioMER label together with designer Jeroen Wille (BE) and has provided artwork for records by Jack Rose (US), Robbie Basho (US), Mauro Antonio Pawlowski (BE), Cian Nugent (IE), Graveyards (US), Second Family Band (US) and many others.Urpf Lanze is the moniker of his rather unorthodox solo guitar project, under which he has been playing for several years now. With an acoustic guitar that lays flat on his lap, tuned to unwieldy scales, he brutalises the instrument in an oddly musical way. As if this wasn't enough he lays down some vocal work that goes from ventriloquist-like whines and mumbles to deep and guttural grunts.
The result is a rather unhinged and demented music. Imagine the rawness of Bill Orcutt, the more frightening sides of Loren Mazzacane Connors and the absurd stylings of Wilburn Burchette all wrapped into a Lovecraftian sonic nightmare. 'Procession of Talking Mirrors' is his first full lenght solo album. Recorded live on a 4-track tape recorder, these 6 tracks offer a mixture of Japanese folk music, free psych, scratchy delta-blues recordings, damaged lo-fi and aggressively percussive fingerpicking. While some tracks may carry a more melancholy tone, others seem closer to acoustic death metal than any kind of folk music.

TINY MIX TAPES
Like the young knight Perceval, who sits speechless and confused in the presence of the Procession of the Grail, Urpf Lanze (real name: Wouter Vanhaelemeesch) stands guitar-in-hand, frog-in-throat, before The Procession of Talking Mirrors. The mirrors reflect a gruesome scene of guitars being torn to shreds by tornado-like fingers; a rumbling superstorm of breath growls and screeches out the echoing chambers of the beast’s vast throat and mouth.
The The Procession of Talking Mirrors LP (which has beautifully appropriate cover artwork made by the musician) will be released by Belgian label audioMER on March 10. For now, the label has posted the riotous finale of the record, “The Lost Wooden Planet Script.”Tiny Mix Tapes, March 2013

WIRE
This is Urpf Lanze aka Belgian visual artist Wouter Vanhaelemeesch's first solo acoustic guitar album. His music has been described as outsider or anti-folk, but here he rides roughshod over such considerations. Some of the pieces approach the ecstatic, naggingly insistent style displayed by James Blackshaw and the late Jack Rose on Raag Manifestos. But if Vanhaelemeesch lacks the refinement of those two players, he makes up for it with aggression. With his acoustic guitar flat on his lap, he subjects it to some rough vocalisations. On "Plague Pillow", where he obsessively works on a picking pattern around three chords, they seem almost absent-minded murmurs. Elsewhere, as on the title track, his grunts, throaty growls and baleful ululations can be distracting, almost comedic. But this track also exemplifies his singular approach to the guitar. Veering from insistent percussive batterings to bending slackened strings to finely articulated runs, he employs disciplined technique and the power of sloppiness in a way that few other guitarists would even consider trying.
By Mike Barnes, WIRE

SCROLLDUST
While he is recognised as one of history’s great Romantic poets, it is less well known that in the later stages of his life Johann Wolfgang von Goethe turned his attention to the natural sciences, becoming a prominent figure in the group of pre-Darwinians now known as the Rational Morphologists. Under the assumption that the species they observed were frozen, unchanging in time, these thinkers searched for the underlying laws of form that governed their development. In a slim but influential volume, The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe argued that all features of plants, stamen, sepals, petals, etc., were essentially variants of a fundamental form, the leaf, raising this structure in his mind to the basic descriptor of all plant life, one which would open a window on the essence of this biological kingdom, the archetypal plant: the urpflanze.
On the face of it, what we have here is a solo guitar album. Wouter Vanhaelemeesch plays with the guitar flat on his lap, often dwelling on a single chord for a whole track, using repetition, tempo, and a style of fingerpicking that distributes and moves accent across notes in a downright psychedelic sort of way. It is percussive and metallic at its most aggressive, bewilderingly hypnotic during quieter moments. Add to this a growling, grunting, wailing vocal presence that never leans towards anything like lyricism or even the control of metal vocals, just an accompanying series of mammalian outbursts requiring neither rhyme nor reason. The result has the exhilarating feeling of a technically talented artist casting the rules down a deep and mosscovered well, at once musically potent and deliciously unhinged, far more grubby than its genre classification might suggest.
At around 40 minutes this is a relatively short album, but in no way does it seem like a job half done. Its vision is chaotic, weird, perhaps uninterpretable, but in the end it comes across with extreme clarity. Paying lip service to blues, folk, and American primitivism along the way, the theme that remains constant across the board is a counterpoise between the roughness of the voice with the violent rattling guitar, and the emergence of subtle melodic and rhythmic patterns among them, perpetually being swept away by altered copies of themselves. It’s a work that wears its vision and artistic allegiances on its sleeve, from the music itself to the subtext in the track titles to the cover art with its shades of Hieronymous Bosch. For anyone with an ear for acoustic guitar music which puts raw humanity ahead of clinical studio treatment, look no further than this.Scrolldust, March 2013

KWADRATUUR
Interview with Urpf Lanze where he talks about his new record. You can read the interview HERE